How can you mobilize Data and Analytics to boost your content strategy?

Contrary to what you might think, content strategy doesn't just involve the right side of the brain, where intuition, emotion and artistry reside. As companies negotiate the digital shift, the floodgates of data are opening, and content marketing is undergoing a transformation from an intuitive, feel-good effort to a data-driven action.

In this context, marketers can collect, sort and analyze Data at every stage of the buying journey, from content consumption behavior to the capture of contact information in a LeadGen context. 

Objectives: streamline editorial choices, refine targeting, improve the deliverability of marketing campaigns and, ultimately, boost the ROI of content marketing efforts.

In this guide you'll find our 4 practical tips for harnessing Data and Analytics to enhance the performance of your content strategy.

#1 Measuring the success of your content marketing is the key to differentiation

Performance metrics collected after distribution provide information on how well the content actually resonates with its target audience. It may be obvious advice, but only 43% of B2C content marketers say they are able to quantify the performance of their campaigns, according to a survey by the Content Marketing Institute. Several studies document this problem:

• 61% of marketers surveyed by Dun & Bradstreet say they don' t have the data they need to feed their MarTech tools,
• 46% of marketers concede major gaps in their data and analytics skills (Michael Page),
• 37% of marketers find it very difficult to measure the performance of their actions (Michael Page),
• 65% of marketers don 't calculate the ROI of Content Marketing (CMI).

 

Given the Data gaps in marketing departments, simply measuring the performance of your content is enough to give you a competitive edge over the competition. Start with simple post-campaign KPIs such as :

• Traffic : how large is the audience that browsed your content?
• Engagement rate : do web users interact with your content? If so, how?
• Conversion rate : what does the audience do after viewing your content? Do visitors take action?

#2 Cross-reference data to take personalization a step further

Once you've integrated this analytical mindset into your content efforts, you can take the analysis a step further.
For example, you can couple traffic data, from your tracking application, with an IP recognition system on your website to analyze traffic quality and assess the relevance of your content to your ideal customer profile.

You can also create a dashboard to cross-reference data and identify best practices. Here's an example provided by the Content Marketing Institute.

Once you've got enough "historical" data, you can start defining the best way to go about it : best publication timing, best topic typology, best format, best theme, and so on.

To take it a step further, you can apply the same Dashboard to the leader in your industry. You won't necessarily have all the data, especially on traffic, but assume that the leader in your niche has the best traffic results, especially if it occupies the top position on Google. Ultimately, you can carry out a channel and content mapping to develop a clearer vision of the roadmap to deploy.

#3 Social Listening: let your audience fill your editorial calendar

Almost a third of content marketers (31%) find it difficult to come up with new content ideas. Rather than rehashing the same themes, why not let your audience tell you about their current interests? Half of all marketers use Social Listening tools such as Mention, Keyhole or Sprout Social to identify what their target audience is talking about on social networks.

In short, it's all about capitalizing on "Tag Cloud" and "Trending Topics" data to feed your editorial calendar with themes relevant to your target audience. This is undoubtedly the best approach for (re)connecting your content marketing strategy with the reality on the ground. Social Listening is best suited to B2C professionals, as the audience is broader, but will be more refined if used in B2B.

In the same way, you can involve your sales people in editorial planning. After all, they're in direct contact with prospects and know their problems, issues and expectations, as well as their verbatim.